Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator talks about the criticality of the Idea and the Products, how to perceive them and how to drive your vision and mission of the start-up around your idea. He also talks about when one should start-up and how the growth of a start-up is dependent on the market size and most of all how student life is ideal for starting-up. Dustin Moskovitz, the co-founder of Facebook, Asana and Good Ventures giving his insights on Why you should start a Start-Up? He breaks the stereotypes of an entrepreneur’s life portrayed in the media as being rich and glamorous and explains the reality of being an entrepreneur.
Paul Graham the co-founder of Y Combinator, compares how a startup is more like a skiing course, and gives a list of counter-intuitive stuffs that we have to remember to prevent our existing instincts from leading us astray. There’s one place where our intuitions become right, that’s when we’re dealing with people, be it as engineering students or as business professionals. Mark Zuckerberg inspite of being a complete rookie in startups, created mutli billion dollar company all because he was able to cater to the needs of his users. The problem that most first time entrepreneurs do is that they follow every fundamental requisite for starting a startup, but fail to do one thing that is essentially important that is to make something important.
Peter Thiel, a well known entrepreneur and investor, discusses the strategy and competition. The basic idea of when you start a company is to consider what makes a business valuable. In order to become a monopoly, you cannot start with a giant market right from day one; but start with domination of a small market and expand from there in concentric circles. In contrast to the prevailing idea that the first mover has an advantage, in some ways it is the last mover or the last mover in a category that has the value. And it is hard to pin point one single formula to become a monopoly. He explains how growth rates are overvalued and durability is undervalued with practical examples. Once you have a breakthrough in technology, it is the constant advancements or more specifically the multitudes of updates to your technology that is going to get to a place where your competitors cannot catch up. Competition does make you better at whatever it is that you’re competing on. It often comes at a tremendous price where you stop asking bigger questions about what’s truly important and truly valuable.
Alex Schultz one of the premiers in Growth Strategy, who has played a key role in Facebook’s popularity as the Vice President of Growth. As you’re brainstorming what matters most, try to brainstorm more on the importance of customer retention and what happens if the customer retention rate falls in line with the asymptote and how do we solve this problem? It’s time to get back to the basics, how many of you still remember the fundamentals of startup? If you don’t a quick recap would be the four key points Idea, Product, Team, Execution and if you need to execute well (growth) then you need to ensure your product is great. How do you determine retention rate? If you’re into marketing and sales (not just digital marketing) you must’ve come across the term market ratio and the emperical formula to calculate that, now apply the same and do some basic math on the differences you obtain then you’ll be able to figure out your retention rate. You’ve got a good retention rate, now when do you decide it is time to scale and who takes care of the growth operations? For startups, it is essential that every individual operating considers themselves as the growth team including the CEO. Just like the retention rates, the targets or in his own words The North Star can be different for different companies, but the team has to operate in the direction for north star. Every site you’ve registered so far was able to retain its customers because it created that magical moment for you, technically it was able to deliver the “unstated customer needs”. If you can deliver that magical moment for your customers, then they’ll stick to your site for a longer duration and eventually you’ll have a higher retention rate. It is not just the new users, but also optimising the growth for churning and resurrecting users. Lot of metrices are going to be correlated, and you need to pick the best one that aligns with your mission and vision as your guiding north star.
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